NEW ENERGY CURRENTS: 2005-09-02

I am speechless/blogless on the unprecedented disaster of Hurricaine Katrina, other than to link again to Instapundit's massive-and-growing list of charities and to offer my prayers, thoughts, and meaningless condolences in the face of all this - I spent two seriously magical, unforgettable days in New Orleans almost exactly two years ago, and will remember it with love.

And it's not just a human tragedy of unspeakable proportions, it's provoking at least a mini-crisis for US gas prices - as noted below, Geoff Styles and Mike Millikin are examining the repercussions for the US energy industry from a variety of angles.

The rest of this post, as usual, is an attempt to provide you with a wide-ranging overview of scientific, commercial, and political developments in the energy industry for the past month - by John Atkinson.

• Bio
• Electricity
• Fossil Fuels
• Hydrogen
• Nuclear
• Solar
• Water
• Wind
• Policy, Etc

Bio

• Wired notes a new waste-to-electricity project in Bangladesh that will not only provide 3-4 MW of electricity (enough to power 50,000 Bangladeshi households) but could produce enough compost fertilizer to meet the total supply needed for Bangladeshi farmers. Worthy of note is the fact that this program was made possible by funding from Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which will give the Netherlands-based backers of the project credits for emissions reductions (via Knowledge Problem).

• Green Car Congress links to news of Shell Deutschland's investment in biomass-to-liquids (BTL) technology that will be used in the development of a commercial facility in Germany to produce 15,000 tonnes/year (or 4,620,000 US gallons/year) of synthetic diesel fuel. More commentary and links over at the Energy Blog.
  
  Electricity

• The US Green Building Council has released a draft set of guidelines for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmnetal Design) standards for houses. Worldchanging's Jamais Cascio takes a look.

• Despite their commercial failure back in the '90s, Jim Energy Blog claims that the electric car is NOT dead (he's just resting!)- and notes plans by three Asian automakers for new electric car models for production in the next few years.

• Robert McLeod has a series of useful posts up on plug-in hybrids, looking at their potential to add flexibility to the grid, suggesting a feebate system to encourage their use, and discussing a white paper on plug-ins by AC Propulsion.

Fossil Fuels

• Green Car Congress's Mike Millikin has several posts up on the effects of Katrina, tallying the damage to crucial infrastructure in the Gulf as well as moves by the EPA as well as auto companies to help with the recovery effort.

• Energy Outlook's Geoff Styles has been keeping up with the longer-term fallout of Hurricaine Katrina, with a pair of posts discussing the potential impact on oil prices, as well as an interesting post on the implications for the siting of US LNG terminals.

• China's growth in recent years is due in part to heavily subsidized oil prices, which may not be sustainable. Econbrowser's James Hamilton discusses and offers a few thoughts, and Gateway Pundit contributes some pictures and links (both via Knowledge Problem).

• The Engineer-Poet is leading and hosting an extremely worthwhile thread discussing ideas for technical fixes for vehicles that could be deployed to reduce fuel consumption immediately in response to a gas crisis. He's putting viable and potentially profitable ideas out into the public domain - get cracking, inventors and entrepreneurs of the world.

• On a similar note, the California Energy Blog links to an LA Times piece about a variety of methods - some effective, some actually counterproductive - that Southern Californians are employing to try and get more bang for their gas bucks.

• CalEnergyGuy is also doing yeoman's work keeping track of the ongoing debate over the siting of LNG terminals in California - go through his August archives for a SLEW of linky posts.

• Robert McLeod over at Entropy Production has an interesting post up on the problem that rising natural gas prices pose for oil sands production, which requires steam that is usually produced by burning natural gas -

• - a topic also discussed in this Green Car Congress piece on France's Total's investment in Canadian oil sands. Total's solution is to try burning liquid residues from oil refining processes called MSAR, Multiphase Superfine Atomized Residue, instead of gas. McLeod's proposed solution: combined heat and power production from a nuclear steam plant.

• Here's ANOTHER solution - Energy Blog notes the development of a new apparatus called a Teleperf developed in conjuction with US DOE that will enable recovery of heavy oil from oil sands without steam injection.

• The first integrated underground coal gasification (UCG) and Fischer-Tropsch diesel plant - coal-to-liquids (CTL), in other words - will be built in Australia over the next few years.

Hydrogen

• Chemists at Purdue University studying a group of organic molecules called organosilanes have unexpectedly discovered a new technique for producing hydrogen. While attempting to convert liquid organosilanes into silanol using a rhenium catalyst, researchers noted that hydrogen gas was also being produced at a high rate. In addition to raising the prospect of the possibility of the use of organosilanes as a hydrogen feedstock, the discovery indicates the possibility that other catalysts might be able to produce hydrogen from other sources of biological material such as garbage or agricultural biomass.

• Georgia Tech researchers have discovered that a chemical called triazole could enable PEM fuel cells to operate at much higher temperatures, increasing their efficiency and solving several related design problems as well.

Nuclear

• From the Department of Not Even Making This Up: In an effort to address persistent local safety concerns, the EPA has proposed guidelines that would guarantee that residents living close to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility would not be exposed to more radiation than residents elsewhere in the US - FOR THE NEXT MILLION YEARS. !! Says EPA assistant administrator Jeff Holmstead, "it is an unprecedented scientific challenge to develop proposed standards today that will protect the next 25,000 generations of Americans." Yet, Nevada state officials still claim that "the million-year standard is too lax compared to protections required for repositories planned in Sweden, Germany, and France." !!!!!!

• From the same department: ABC News has apparently been using summer interns as 'investigative reporters' attempting to breach security at nuclear Test, Research, and Training Reactors (TRTR) around the country. They not only failed miserably but probably broke the law in the process. Real classy, ABC, I hope these kids were at least getting travel expenses or course credits or something - I'm sure they learned something, at least.

• The head of MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering makes a plea for increased funding for US fusion research, as the construction of the international experimental fusion reactor ITER threatens to drain the budget of the US fusion program (via Peak Oil Optimist).

Solar

• Southern California Edison has agreed to purchase 20 years' worth of electricity from a new 4,500 acre Stirling Engine-powered solar farm in Victorville, California. The farm will be designed for 500 MW capacity and could be expanded to 850 MW, making it the largest solar power facility in the world and giving it more capacity than the combined total of all other US solar projects. More info and background on Stirlings over on the Energy Blog.

• A Canadian engineer has built a prototype photovoltaic-augmented hybrid car, a 2001 Toyota Prius with solar cells on its roof to supplement the power provided by the car's existing battery. Despite the fact that the prototype was built with a number of technical limits, it succeeded in improving the car's fuel efficiency by 10% - not nothing, for sure.

• While far-out proposals for ginormous 100+ MW solar towers have garnered a lot of attention in the past few months, it looks like a more modest, 11 MW solar tower near Seville, Spain may be the first to actually be built.

• @Monkeysign revisits a favorite topic, the potential problem posed by a silicon supply shortage for the photovoltaic industry, and critically examines a proposed solution that would use dirty silicon to address said shortage.

Water

• Carolyn Elefant happily notes some regulatory relief for ocean projects from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has stated that experimental tidal projects (such as Verdant Power's tidal farm in NYC's East River) do not require FERC licensing.

Wind

• Construction has begun on a wind farm on the Campo Indian Reservation outside San Diego which will be the first large-scale commercial wind farm on Indian lands in the US. Not only that, but the farm will employ the largest turbines currently in use in the US, with blades 136 feet long, and have a total generating capacity of 50 MW from 25 of the 2 MW turbines (via California Energy Blog).

Policy, Etc

• A group of nine northeast US states - New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont - are working on a plan to institute a regional cap on greenhouse gas emissions. NEI notes that 75 percent of non-emitting electricity in the US is currently provided by nuclear energy and hopes that nuclear energy is thus included in the program.

• California's landmark "million solar roofs" initiative has been jeopardized, as state Democrats have inserted provisions into the bill that would require union-based wages for solar installations, among other union-backed proposals. State Republicans claim that this could raise installation costs by 30 percent, and Governor Schwarzenegger has threatened a veto (via California Energy Blog).

• Robert McLeod notes two excellent and free resources available to those wishing to model the performance of renewable energy systems: Natural Resources Canada's RETScreen and the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory's HOMER.

• On the subject of computer tools - supercomputers capable of performing ridiculously complex quantum calculations at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Molecular Sciences Computing Facility may play a crucial role in developing better hydrogen storage materials as well as developing advanced combustion systems.

That's it for now - as always, please send any links, tips, questions, and (especially) hottt gossip to newenergy - at - windsofchange.net. See you - from now on - for real - I hope - on the LAST Friday of every month -